Clarke Peters

Clarke Peters Quick Links

Somebody messed with the wrong mother when they murdered her daughter Angela Hayes (Kathryn Newton). Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand) will stop at nothing to make sure that her child's killer is caught and after several months of still no arrests, she decides to take drastic action. She forks out for three enormous billboards to go up in her Missouri town with a message to the highly respected Police Sheriff Bill Willoughby (Woody Harrelson). An embarrassed Willoughby visits her to encourage her to take the billboards down, but she's standing firm and will certainly not be intimidated by police involvement - or, indeed, anyone who dares complain about them. She assaults her dentist with his own drill after discovering that he made a complaint and attacks two local high school kids who try to mock her. Even the local vicar is trying to appeal to her sanity at this point, but when she torches the local police station, it becomes clear that she's quickly becoming way out of control.

The end of GCSE exams is approaching and, while many students around the country will be preparing for a messy weekend in Magaluf, it's a guarantee that none of their antics will match those of Mr. Wickers and his troublemaking class. He's always been a terrible teacher, but for Alfie Wickers, a true adventure is needed to seal his unbreakable bond with his tearaway pupils - and so it's off to Cornwall they go, to the chagrin of the kids' worried mothers. It might seem like an innocent school trip, but they're forced to prepare themselves for some unexpected incidents involving seriously menacing farmer locals, as well as Alfie's ruthless old school chums. It gets even worse when the group go missing, and wind up wanted by police and all over the news. But it still could go down as the best school trip ever.

Flik Royale is a sullen, thirteen-year old boy from middle-class Atlanta, Georgia, who is sent to live with his preacher grandfather, Da Good Bishop Enoch Rouse, in the housing projects of Red Hook, Brooklyn for the summer.

Millions of hearts broke when season four of The Wire reached its bleak conclusion. The cause of this mass cardiac disintegration was twofold: first, most of the teenage boys in the season's primary storyline seemed doomed to nasty and short lives. And second, the single greatest work of dramatic television in the history of the medium had come to an end. That couldn't be easy for anyone's emotions.

Fifteen months later, The Wire returned for its brilliant swan song. David Simon, Ed Burns, and crew famously dedicated each season of The Wire to an institutional failure (the drug war, the middle class, political reform, the schools) that has contributed to the extended death of Baltimore, and by extension all of America's inner cities. For the show's final go-round, the show takes on the decline of local media. Simon spent years -- several of them tumultuous -- at the Baltimore Sun before he started creating amazing TV shows. Naturally, Simon brings much of his personal disaffection and melancholy to his portrayal of that disintegrating daily.

By the end of season three of The Wire -- aka HBO's best excuse for staying on the air -- one could sense that the show had, in some sense of the word, come to an end. It was certainly clear for a time that HBO executives thought so, having come close to canceling the multifaceted, frighteningly addictive urban drama yet again, as it never pulled anywhere near the kind of ratings that their warhorses like The Sopranos and Sex and the City had. Although plenty of strings were left dangling at the conclusion of episode 37, "Mission Accomplished," a chapter had been definitively closed, with Avon Barksdale back in jail, and his brainy partner Stringer Belle gunned down. Since the two of them had been the impressive foils to the strung-out cops in the Baltimore Major Crimes Unit, their departure seemed to leave a vacuum. With nobody of real consequence running the West Baltimore drug trade (the Barksdales' chief rival and replacement, Marlo Stanfield, seems at first nothing more than some punk kid), what would be left that was worth watching?

During its run on HBO, The Wire has established itself as nothing less than an epic television show. It tackles a monstrous issue -- the illegal drug trade, with its manifold social, economic, criminal, and moral implications -- and resounds with the ring of truth like no other police drama before it. Whether an episode features a glimpse into the lives of stevedores at a dying Baltimore port, a candid peek at the inner-workings of city government, or a look at the relationships between cops and the drug dealers they're forever chasing, The Wire gets it, right down to the last bill of lading, backroom deal, and warrant for arrest.

The second season is no different. It's riveting television that pulses with realism, intelligence, and harrowing drama. If by chance you've stumbled upon this review without having watched the first season, update your Netflix queue immediately, with The Wire: Season One at the top. Like nearly all of today's best hour-long dramas, its multilayered storytelling technique demands a great deal of attention to detail from the viewer. The show can't be fully appreciated without understanding each character's nuanced backstory and the history of interactions and conflicts everyone has with one another. So start at the beginning and enjoy.

Sadly, the most passionate and persuasive argument in recent years against the current disposition of the government's stance in the so-called "War on Drugs" came not from a think tank armed with stats and big ideas or a celebrity eager for a cause, but from a TV show. The third season of The Wire, which aired on HBO in late 2004, continued its sprawling and justifiably lauded Dickensian crawl through its web of stories centering on the inner Baltimore drug trade -- following, with an unusual focus to detail and character, both the gangs fighting for territory and the cops of a major case unit assigned to busting up their organizations. But where the show became more than just an abnormally well-made, balanced, and realistic law and order drama (and there's no need here to heap more praise on the show than already has been done), and became something entirely different, was in the fourth episode, "Amsterdam."

Police major "Bunny" Colvin (previously a supporting player on the show), desperate to see some improvement in his crime-ridden West Baltimore district and tired of watching his cops waste all their time busting street corner dealers to no larger effect, institutes a new policy: If all drug dealers move to three designated zones in the district and sell there, they will not be arrested. In effect, he legalizes the drug trade in a large part of an American city. The cops don't get it, the drug-dealing kids don't either, as it throws into question the entire reality of their limited universe where the kids sell drugs, occasionally they get hassled or arrested, but everything goes on without change; as one of the dealers says, "Why you got to go and fuck with the program?"

The point being made here by the two creative forces behind The Wire -- investigative reporter David Simon and veteran detective Ed Burns, both of whom know this territory better than almost anyone -- is quite simple: the drug trade has atomized vast and forgotten swaths of American cities, like West Baltimore, and decades of simplistic, head-knocking, "tough on crime" enforcement has made zero difference. So, take a page out of Amsterdam's book, where a blind eye is turned to the drug traffic in certain designated areas, and see if you can at least make some poor neighborhoods normal again by ridding them of turf-battling drug gangs.

Colvin -- a strange kind of revolutionary -- gives a speech using the "brown paper bag" analogy Simon introduced in his book The Corner: Men drinking on the street will carry their liquor in a brown paper bag -- the cops know it's liquor but don't arrest them for public drinking because the men are at least making an attempt at hiding the bottle. It's the same with pushing drug dealing to what Colvin calls the "free zones"; it's a civil truce. Call it legalization, call it a truce, call it dealing with reality, Simon's point is that drugs will be dealt, and the more you can keep the trade itself from ruining the social fabric of already distressed neighborhoods, the better. And if you can weave this message into a thrilling hour-long crime drama, all the better.

As for what the remainder of this season dealt with, it would be futile to go into much discussion of that, since The Wire's storylines rival Tolstoy's in their complexity. Suffice it to say that one must watch the show as one reads a book, starting at the beginning of season three -- even with that "previously, on The Wire" intro which HBO prefaces its shows with -- is next to useless. For those who have already been watching, of primary importance is that the show's quality remains undimmed. Simon's writing staff has been beefed up by the addition of top-shelf novelists like Richard Price (Clockers) and George Pelecanos (The Night Gardener), who bring some welcome flourishes of both character-driven realism and pulp crime drama to the proceedings. A few of the show's more central characters get their arcs reversed, with the classically rogueish cop McNulty (a wonderfully snarky Dominic West) coming to a crisis of self-destruction, and striving criminal mastermind Stringer Bell (the iconic and contemplative Idris Elba) finding himself stuck between worlds, too street for the business world and too thoughtful for the street. And although several long-running characters continue to pop up -- like free-range gunslingers Omar (Michael K. Williams) and Brother Mouzone (Michael Potts), and Bubbles (Andre Royo), the junkie who serves as the closest thing The Wire has to a chorus -- story is always sublimated to the overarching themes, with the focus never straying far from Simon's central conceit of the American city in crisis, and what to do about it.

The Wire has cast a sardonic eye on the efficacy of current drug law enforcement since the beginning. In the very first episode, a detective who just used the term "War on Drugs" gets a quick schooling from another detective on why the term just doesn't apply, with the world-wearied quip, "Wars end." By presenting an idea for how one might, if not win a war that has done so much damage to American cities and the economically disadvantaged, then at least call an honorable truce, the show became not just the best show currently on television, but also possibly the most important.

Neil Jordan knows movies are a form of art. While much of his work carries a distinctive artistic style, his involving 1986 drama Mona Lisa even carries the title of the famous painting of a dark, serene, mysterious woman with a slight grin on her face -- the Mona Lisa.

Mona Lisa shares much in common with that painting. The film contains a female character who is serene, dark, and mysterious. It doesn't take a genius, however, to comprehend that the leading actress here is a lot sexier than the woman in the painting.

You're stuck as a lawman on a moon of Jupiter, where they do nothing but mine titanium. When the shit goes down, who ya gonna call? This harrowing sci-fi flick has mellowed with age over the years, but Sean Connery's performance is still good, and the first couple of acts are still quite engaging. Too bad the finale ends up being one big shootout. Hell, we could get that back on earth.